Personal thoughts about learning, community and social affordances for knowledge creation

February 19, 2006

KM failing?

In an endless quest to discover our KM roots, articulate or bound a clear KM domain, and agree on basic postulates, we seem to be as scattered and divided as ever, in danger of falling off the corporate map and being absorbed by other fads.

Kaye Vivian has asked a number of interesting questions in her Dove Lane blog that explore this very area and asks if we:

have been hijacked by vendors? - for a while but they have dropped us now

are missing the bigger picture? - not sure, KM is a dynamic & emergent domain

lack metrics? - do not believe this is a key issue

confuse our audience? - agree, we cannot even gather a wikipedia entry that explains what or whom we are

Is this a bad thing?

Do not think so.

KM meta-talk helps to keep the conversation alive. True we have lost conference attendance, KM articles no longer get published in HBR, Business2.0, Information Week, Wired or MIT Sloan Management Review at the rate we saw in 1994-2002, Internet KM forums have dwindled, new Km books are far and few between, academic courses have changed title and Act-KM is the only worthwhile listserve.

Our conversations are now distributed, diverse and fragmented. KM Bloggers are helping to keep the flame alive, while KM practices appear in learning2.0, library 2.0 and related themes. Social software applications now replace large monolithic software as the way to go. Back-channel dialog (via Skype, IM and e-mail) substitutes for cozy on-line discussions, and key issues have shifted from yellowpages and corporate memory to social networks and RSS feeds.

KM may be fading from the corporate radar, but the key propositions, the value and paradigmatic advances remain strong, important and resurface as P2P networking, virtual teams, enterprise networks, innovation theory, informal learning ......

TrackBack

Comments

is km failing? my opinion is formed, but with less than 100% confidence; 75-80% maybe. i see km as a pretty much a failed business management practice. everyone draws upon their own personal experience when responding with an opinion. my opinion is no different. i draw upon my personal involvement in two business management practices that came into prominence before km; tqm and bpr. like km, their cache' , visibility, and fundamental relevance has subsided. but, in my opinion, tqm and bpr represent two very different exits from prominence. i see bpr as having gone away due to its being founded on a largely failed premise; wholesale process replacement based on exterior rationalized "engineering" rather than continuous, adaptive adjustment. and i see tqm as having gone away because of its ubiquitous adoption and then adaption into all other business management practices, so that tqm itself. no longer mattered. thats the way i view the histories of tqm and bpr. and, i have a clear sense that km may have fallen more into the bpr model than the tqm pattern. what do you think?